The thoughts of a journalist/libertarian–conservative/Christian husband, father, Eagle Scout and aficionado of obscure rock music. Thoughts herein are only the author’s and not necessarily the opinions of his family, friends, neighbors, church members or past, present or future employers.

The (dis)United States of (more than one) America

The media has run and retracted a host of stories about Donald Trump and his administration since Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath of office. The MLK bust was gone before it was not. The State Department senior staff all resigned before they didn’t. James Comey asked for more funding for the Russia investigation before he didn’t.

The story about Donald Trump giving away key intelligence details to the Russians has been met with a full throated denial by the White House on key details that are actually not in the Washington Post story. Given the media’s track record of stories about Donald Trump, where they report first and ask questions later, one can be excused for being skeptical of this story.

I would be but for knowing one of the sources, who is a credible, reliable source who supports the President, but is appalled and using the leaks as a way to message back to a President who has otherwise gone tone deaf to criticism of his behavior.

While the media cries wolf, so too does President Trump. He has seemingly never met a truth he has not cheated on. He confuses the ring of truth with a marriage ring.

Of course, he is also the scorpion riding the back of the frog, always wondering why he is on the verge of drowning above a dead frog.

On top of all that, let’s not ignore the politics of convenience here. If Barack Obama had done what Donald Trump did, many of the same people calling for impeachment would be doubling down on defense of Obama. For those who say Barack Obama would never do this, many of us don’t believe you. Doubly so, President Obama is still defending the repeated crossing of his red line in Syria and many of acolytes are as well, despite that action being directly related to emboldening the Syrian regime.

Everything in Washington is now relative and tribal. Each side now competes for elections to impose their own morality and choices on the people as a whole. With the left, they demand unending culture war. We must all accept and pay for abortion and we must all accept and provide goods and services to gay weddings. We cannot decide this by state, as the founders intended.

The left and right both want to use Washington as they see fit with no real restraints on their agendas. The founders intended Washington to be useful for little and the states to be useful for much. Not any more. Both sides have incorporated the Bill of Rights against the states, which the founders expressly did not and which was only done through Supreme Court divination in the twentieth century.

The stakes have grown so high as five black robed masters demand their morality be imposed on 320 million people and the federal government insists a heterogeneous people be homogenized. There is no room on either side for diversity of thought. The tribe, not the nation, is all that matters.

Washington is dysfunctional and our President is a dolt well out of his league. The only honest thing he has said of late is that the job is harder than he expected.

The left will give him no benefit of any doubt and the GOP will excuse his every action. Our nation is broken. It does not work. Neither side has an ounce of grace for the other. Traditional values are now bigotry to the left. College campuses silence dissent in ways that would make Hitler proud. Washington is supposed to do everything. And Washington does nothing well. Outrage is defined by party, not objective truth.

Perhaps it is time we end this experience. Few people really want a country as the founders envisioned and those of us who do are assailed from both sides. The stakes have been escalated beyond any amount of reason and should the Democrats eventually take back the White House, which they will, everything they have attacked Trump for will suddenly be embraced and every Republican who has defended Trump will attack the future Democrat President.

Let’s not pretend otherwise. We have Democrats running Republican congressmen off the road and reporters writing stories justifying it. We have environmental wackos blaming global warming on too many people, but they refuse to go first and kill themselves. We have Republican congressmen targeting businesses whose employees oppose the congressmen. It is only a matter of time before real shots are fired. Democrats are convinced the President is committing treason and Republicans are war criminals. Meanwhile, conservatives are convinced the left has created an existential threat against their cultural existence.

I asked once how many Americans would die because of Barack Obama’s failed policies. The same must now be asked of Donald Trump. And we must all legitimately ask how many Americans will be killed by their fellow American because of once trivial political differences that are now treated as crimes against humanity.

Our national union is fraying at the seams and I think we have reached the point where it is best to go on and tear it into fifty pieces and move on, each state its own.

The only real alternative should be an immediate repeal of the fourteenth and seventeenth amendments so that national elections become more diffuse through state legislative elections and the demands of moral and cultural homogeneity through conjured divinations in equal protection die by the wayside. Force each state, its laws, and its morality to be relevant again. That is the only way to preserve the nation.

It is safe to say that repeal of the 14th Amendment is a nonstarter, immediate or not. The 17th Amendment, which gives voters of states to elect U.S. senators instead of state legislatures, is unlikely to be repealed either. Apparently Erickson believes that the 32 states with Republican-controlled legislatures (25 of which, including Wisconsin, also have Republican governors) would produce a different Senate, though it’s not as if, for instance, a state legislature would be able to expel that state’s Democratic senator, elected two years earlier by a different legislature, from office.

Erickson’s understandable wish to make “national elections more diffuse,” of course, would serve to lock in the order of things, with liberal California and New York and the more-conservative rest of the nation. That last sentence, however, doesn’t quite accurately portray individual states, including Wisconsin, where liberal Milwaukee and Madison opposes the much more conservative rest of the state. (For that matter, liberal Milwaukee is surrounded by conservative suburbs.) Inner California isn’t nearly as liberal as its coast. There is a move to split the state of Washington into two states, the easternmost of which would be called ‘Liberty.” (Maybe Madison can be split off into its own, and call it Communist Scumbags.)